Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 19, 2025
With the upper classes, with the "reactionaries" as he called them, he was severe and even rude, but with the people he was simple, and treated a peasant like a brother. He managed his property fairly well, his head was full of all sorts of socialist schemes, which he could no more put into practice than he could finish his articles on the shortcomings of the artillery.
It was, of course, natural that the reactionaries should make the most possible of this act of the would-be assassin, and, when photographs of several prominent socialists were found on his person, a great clamor arose for a coercive law to destroy the social democrats. The question was immediately discussed in the Reichstag, but the moderate forces prevailed, and the bill was rejected.
But the meanest of the tools, Man, had still this strange privilege which God had given him, doubtless by mistake. The firm was not only encumbered with one useless servant, but he immediately turned himself into five useless servants. "The poor should not be emancipated," the old reactionaries used to say, "until they are fit for freedom."
There are at this moment wealthy reactionaries of such obtuse morality that they regard the public servant who prosecutes them when they violate the law, or who seeks to make them bear their proper share of the public burdens, as being even more objectionable than the violent agitator who hounds on the mob to plunder the rich.
The king's oldest brother, the count of Provence, was more successful than the king in the flight of June, 1791: he eluded detection and joined the count of Artois at Coblenz. Had the reactionaries been restricted entirely to emigres and the royal family, it is hardly possible that they would have been so troublesome as they were.
And when we consider the conditions and the elements with which this inexperience was dealing, the dangerous element at the top and the other dangerous element beneath the surface, the ambitions of the princes, and the volcanic fires in the lowest class; and when we think of the waiting nation, hoping, fearing, expecting so much, with a tremendous war indemnity to be paid, while their hearts were heavy over the loss of two provinces; when we recall all this, we wonder, not that they made mistakes and accomplished so little, but that the government moved on, day by day, step by step, calmly meeting crises from reactionaries or from radicals, until the confidence of the world was won, and the stability of republican France assured.
In Dostoievsky's books, madmen, idiots, drunkards, consumptives, degenerates, visionaries, reactionaries, anarchists, nympholepts, criminals and saints jostle one another in a sort of "Danse Macabre," but not one of them but has his moment of ecstasy.
I do not deny the greatness and nobleness of Alexander II and the services of the men he then called to his aid; but I lived in Russia both before and since that reform, and feel obliged to testify that, thus far, its main purpose has been so thwarted by reactionaries that there is, as yet, little, if any, practical difference between the condition of the Russian peasant before and since obtaining his freedom.
You wished it to be understood that you were open-minded "forward looking," as Mr. Wilson, who turned reactionary at the test, called it; that you were broad, sympathetic, free from mean prejudices, progressive, in short. Our very best reactionaries of to-day all used to call themselves progressive. Some still do.
The reopening of the Workmen's Club in Castro was the chance for an event. Caesar was in favour of inaugurating the Club without any celebration, without attracting the attention of the Clericals; but the members of the Club, on the contrary, wished to give the reactionaries a dose to swallow, and Caesar could not but promise his participation in the inauguration.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking